The option of an oversized, intermittent renewable-energy-sources system to feed the storage is also ineffective. This is because, in this case, energy can be taken directly from the large intermittent supply, making storage superfluous.

Let that sink in for a minute.

The staff of Solar Daily wrote, in all apparent seriousness, that over-producing electricity to store for later is "ineffective" because the energy could be used immediately. This is like saying that keeping a bank account is "ineffective" because you could spend your entire paycheck immediately when you get it. This is utterly illogical and incoherent. Obviously one often needs money in between paychecks. Obviously, the same is even more true of energy. But they can't bring themselves to say so.

If I had to guess at the state of mind of the people who wrote it, I'd have to say that this is the product of some serious cognitive dissonance. The facts force a conclusion that they simply cannot admit to themselves, so they engage in tortured language to try to rationalize it away. I'll bet that they breathed a collective sigh of relief when they were done sweeping the issue under the rug... again. But what will they do when it returns? It's not going away.

The truth of the matter is that, aside from pumped hydro, even overnight storage of electric power is far too costly to be acceptable. This unwelcome truth is why Germany plans to continue digging and burning lignite forever, while its pumped-hydro storage plants go broke. And that is why the Energiewende is failing, YoY German carbon emissions are rising, and the earth's climate is apparently doomed to shift radically in the next century. It's because of a lack of honesty; too many of us cannot admit to ourselves when we are wrong.
¶ 2/01/2017 08:58:00 AM

Comments:

Solar Daily staff writers appear to be paraphrasing this sentence from the abstract of the Fritz Wagner study:

"The option of an oversized iRES system to feed the storage is also not effective because, in this case, energy can be taken directly from the large iRES supply, making storage superfluous."

The entire Solar Daily article is a little more than a copy and paste of a few lines from the abstract. Oddly the staff writer left out the conclusion stated in the abstract:

"As the German energy transition replaces one CO2-free electricity supply system by another one, no major reduction in CO2 emission can be expected till 2022, when the last nuclear reactor will be switched off...The continuation of the economic response --to replace expensive gas fuel by cheap lignite-- causes an overall increase in CO2 emission. The German GHG emission targets for 2020 and beyond are therefore in jeopardy."